“Good! So you are a mining-man—I wondered.”
She had wondered about him. Gard turned the thought over in his mind, the while he told her something of his discovery in the mountains. It seemed a marvelous thing that she should have thought of him at all. Almost unconsciously he began telling her of finding his claim; of working it; and of Jinny.
Helen listened with rapt interest. She knew that men did go off into the mountains as she supposed Gard must have done. She had talked with prospectors, in her lifetime, but never with one like this.
“I suppose you will be wonderfully rich when you begin working your claim in earnest,” she said, at last, slowly, “Shall you like that?”
“I think so. There are some things I want a good deal”—Ah, how much he wanted them: the right to freedom; the right to hold up his head among men. Gard’s desire for this was increasing with every moment that he sat talking to this fair, unconscious girl. As he looked at her, sitting before him on the sparse grass, it came home to him with fearful force that it would be hard to have friends if his past life must always be a secret from them.
“I suppose there are,” Helen was saying, half wistfully, “Money brings so many opportunities to a man.”
“Not unless he’s a real man to start with,” replied Gard.
“There’s a lot to be thought about,” he went on. “I used to think that to give a man plenty to eat, and wear, and good things round him; nice, beautiful things such as we read about—and I guess that you’ve always seen,” he explained,—“would help make a better man of him.
“I don’t believe it’s altogether so,” he went on, following a train of thought that he had often mulled over, in the glade, “All the good things that you can put a man into won’t make any better man of him, if when he didn’t have ’em he wasn’t trying to make a better man of himself.”
Helen pondered his saying in some surprise.